Opera in perspective / by John D. Drummond.
| Author/creator | Drummond, John D. |
| Format | Book |
| Publication Info | Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1980. |
| Description | 383 pages : music ; 24 cm |
| Subjects |
| Contents | The origins of music drama. Music-drama and opera ; Beginnings ; Man the hunter ; Music-drama as image-making ; Images and music ; Apollo and Dionysos ; The image-maker ; Man the planter -- The music-drama of ancient Greece. Predecessors ; Greek music-drama ; Aeschylus' The Persians ; Sophocles' King Oedipus ; Euripides' The Bacchae ; Hellenistic culture ; Enthusiasm, ceremony and narrative ; Death and rebirth -- Rome and the middle ages. The music-drama of Rome ; The collapse of the Roman empire ; Christian ritual as music-drama ; Popular medieval music and drama ; Ecclesiastical music-drama ; The English mystery plays -- Rebirth. Orpheus ; Renaissance and reformation ; The music of the spheres ; Music and drama in the Italian renaissance ; The Florentine Camerata ; Peri's L'Euridici ; Monteverdi's L'Orfeo -- Opera seria. Baroque and classical ; Rhetoric ; The opera-house in the baroque period ; French drama and opera ; The conventions of opera seria ; Handel's Rodelinda ; Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice -- Comic music-drama. Comedy and tragedy ; Aristophanes and Menander ; The Commedia dell'arte ; Progress and music ; Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro -- Romantic opera. The sources of romantic opera ; Music and symbol ; French grand opera ; Italian romantic opera ; Verdi's Rigoletto ; German romantic opera ; Weber's Der Freischütz ; Romantic opera as music-drama -- Wagner and after. Wagner and romanticism ; Dramatic themes in Tristan und Isolde ; Musico-dramatic structures in Tristan und Isolde ; The twentieth-century confusion ; The nineteenth century continues ; New formal principles ; The return to the past -- Alternative realities. Music-drama as dream ; Debussy's Pelléas et Melisande ; The clash of worlds ; The avant-garde ; Paths to the hinterworld ; What next? |
| Abstract | The author's concern in this book is to place opera with the wider context of music-drama and to trace its changing forms with Western European cultural value-systems. He finds the origins of opera in primitive uses of mime and ritual. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliography (pages 365-369) and index. |
| LCCN | 79028697 |
| ISBN | 0816608482 : |